Most of you visiting turdpolishertv remember me as a loud, bawdy, shoot from the hip guy. That never-say excuse-me attitude got me crossways with the suits from corporate. Seems publicly taking an opinion and using the in-house examples of what’s wrong with the business (and linking said examples for the world to see) are against corporate policy.

I never claimed to be real bright.

After more than one Come-to-Jesus Meeting and a two-year hiatus, I’ve discovered something. It happened while I attempted to mold a dozen mushy college minds into hot-shot multi-platform journalists in three hours. Their eyes glazed over about ten minutes in, but they did their best to humor the dude with the toilet-bowl-brush beard blathering in front of the big-screen.

While I waxed poetic about the beauty of sound and the love of tripod, they updated their facebook status. When I transitioned to Doglick Lives, they checked on Kim Kardashian’s marital status.

These were the fresh faces of the future of the TV/web industry, and like all fresh faces before them, they didn’t have a clue . . . and most of them (the web guys anyway) couldn’t give two shits about the dude in day-glo logowear.

The future of the business is in trouble, and for a guy like me, who considers a story falling short of it’s potential a mortal sin, there’s only one thing to do. Keep preaching.

So, this is my attempt to catalogue and hand on what I’ve learned about storytelling through more than twenty years in the television business. I don’t know the difference between bandwidth and rubberbands, or compression rates and compression shorts, but storytelling; be it for TV, in print, or on the web; is all the same.

Character, conflict and emotion.

What I’ll share ain’t groundbreaking. Hell, I stole half of what I know from the guys who came before me. But it’s my way of passing it on, paying it forward, and buying indulgences from the newsgods for the sins I have committed against the stories I should have polished brighter.

I didn’t die . . . just kinda dried up for a while. Still trying to find the balance between the crusty old fart I was and the new (a-hem) high-brow author-type dude they say I gotta be now that I’ve got a novel lurking at the bottom of the top 1-million. What do you think about a burlap jacket with denim patches on the elbows?